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New Apollo programme wants moonshot budget to boost renewables

By Andy Coghlan

Easy to generate, harder to store

(Image: Armando Ferrari/Getty)

If renewable energy were cheaper than coal, it would be a major help in achieving the crucial target of keeping global warming below 2 °C. This week a worldwide initiative is being launched in London to achieve just such a transformation in energy costs within 10 years.

“The challenge is as big as putting a man on the moon,” says Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, one of the founders of the programme along with other prominent scientists, economists and industrialists. “It took £15 billion a year over 10 years to get a man on the moon, and we’re suggesting that’s the absolute minimum needed globally per year to crack this problem.”

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“We need to create clean energy that’s cheaper than fossil fuel, and once we reach that, we win on all fronts,” says David King, the UK government’s special representative for climate change and another founder member.

The group expects governments of many countries to agree to earmark 0.02 per cent of their annual economic output to the effort. King says several countries have already committed to supporting it, including the US, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, India, China and the United Arab Emirates, plus the European Union.

Roadmap

Each contributing country would be a member of the consortium, with the research effort guided by a “roadmap committee” of senior researchers and engineers. The plan is to have the programme up and running before the UN climate talks in Paris this December.

The expectation is that countries will reach the goal of undercutting coal by 2025. Member states must provide the money to drive the leaps in technology that will eventually see business take over investment in storage and smart grid programmes. “We want to de-risk the process for the private sector,” says King.

Cracking the storage problem is critical to more widespread adoption of renewable power, because supplies of wind and solar energy are intermittent and any surplus cannot be stored efficiently for periods of heavy demand – in the evenings for example.

The most promising solutions include novel batteries and capacitors, compressed air, molten salt and pumping water to an elevated dam to act as a source of hydropower, but all are far from optimal at present.

Getting the price of renewables below that of coal is “an idea whose time has come, and whose time cannot be postponed” says Nick Stern of the London School of Economics.

“If we really care about the future of civilisation, this is quite a big call for action,” says King. “This is a massively important global opportunity and we need to commit ourselves to action up to and beyond Paris.”